Grammy Award-Winning BMOP/sound Releases Elliott Carter: Ballets

Elliott Carter: Ballets (#1077)

Composer: Elliott Carter (1908-2012)
Release Date: March 2, 2021
TRT: 65:57
Works: Pocahontas (1939), The Minotaur (1947)
Performers: Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) led by Gil Rose (conductor)    

Boston, MA (For Release 03.02.21) — Known as the nation’s foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music, Grammy Award-winning BMOP/sound today announced the release of Elliott Carter: Ballets, the only album featuring both of Carter’s orchestral works made for ballet: Pocahontas and The Minotaur. Led by conductor Gil Rose and performed by the intrepid Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), Ballets represents Carter’s early period when his music reflected the neo-classical influences of studies with Walter Piston and Gustav Holst at Harvard (1926-32) and with Stravinskian disciple and master pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He had a strict and thorough training in counterpoint, and this shows in the album’s two large-scale ballet scores. 

Carter’s desire to compose music derived from hearing Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring in 1924. “I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever heard, and I wanted to do like that, too," Elliott Carter recalled. "Of course, half the audience walked out, which was even more pleasant to me. It seemed much more exciting than Beethoven and Brahms and the rest of them." Carter went on to compose only two ballets, both commissioned by a man he knew in college, Lincoln Kirstein, who co-founded the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine in New York City. 

The first, Pocahontas, was a flop. It premiered in 1939 by the touring, training company Ballet Caravan (also founded by Kirstein) with choreography by Lew Christensen. Carter’s music was described by The New York Times as “so thick it is hard to see the stage through it.” The second, The Minotaur, was also commissioned by Kirstein for the Ballet Society of New York (later to become the New York City Ballet) in 1947, and sadly, was another critical failure. The work is based on the ancient Greek mythological tale of a man-bull, the Cretan labyrinth in which he was imprisoned, and the Greek warrior, Theseus, who killed the Minotaur. Initially intended for choreographer Balanchine, The Minotaur was instead set by Balanchine’s young assistant, John Taras. 

Like many other ballet composers, Carter fashioned orchestral suites from the original scores in the hopes of bringing the music to the concert hall. In the Suite from Pocahontas, published in 1941 and revised in 1960, he omitted the ambush scene and the extended scene. The complete original music for Pocahontas had never been recorded until now. For the Suite from The Minotaur, published in 1956, Carter omitted about one-third of the original music. Carter is internationally recognized as one of the most influential American voices in classical music, and a leading figure of modernism in the 20th and 21st centuries. He was noted as “one of America’s most distinguished creative artists in any field” by his friend Aaron Copland. He received numerous honors and accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize on two occasions, Germany’s Ernst Von Siemens Music Prize and the Prince Pierre Foundation Music Award, and was the first composer to receive the United States National Medal of Arts, and is one of a handful of composers inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.

About BMOP/sound          
BMOP/sound, BMOP’s independent record label, was created in 2008 to provide a platform for BMOP’s extensive archive of music, as well as to provide widespread, top-quality, permanent access to both classics of the 20th century and the music of today’s most innovative composers. BMOP/sound has garnered praise from the national and international press. It is the recipient of a 2020 Grammy Award for Tobias Picker: Fantastic Mr. Fox as well as eight Grammy Award nominations, and its releases have appeared on the year-end “Best of” lists of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Time Out New York, American Record Guide, DownBeat, WBUR, NewMusicBox, and others. Admired, praised, and sought after by artists, presenters, critics, and audiophiles, BMOP and BMOP/sound are uniquely positioned to redefine the new music concert and recording experience. Launched in 2019, BMOP's digital radio station, BMOP/radio, streams BMOP/sound's entire catalog and airs special programming. BMOP.org

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